Who doesn’t love a roast chicken…am I right? Crispy, salty skin over tender, juicy meat. The aroma of home cooking wafting through the house. Tasty leftovers to use all week in sandwiches, soups, pastas and more.
Mastering a delicious roast chicken is not an art …it’s really too simple for that…which is one of the many reasons why I call this recipe Lazy Roast Chicken. It’s so easy to make you’re going to feel positively lazy!
This recipe literally takes no effort whatsoever and has only four ingredients…salt and pepper being two of them. You don’t have to lift the skin off the breast for butter or herbs. You don’t have to put a lemon or garlic into its cavity. You don’t have to tie up the legs with twine, tuck the wing tips under the body {which I still haven’t figured out how to do well}, and you don’t even have to baste the darn thing.
All you do is pre-heat the pan, rub the chicken body with olive oil, sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper, pop it into the oven and you’re done. Once it’s in the oven, you are free to dilly dally, goof off, or just hang out.*
And, when it’s done, you’ll notice that the chicken legs are slightly splayed {now doesn’t IT look lazy?}, the crispy skin is a gorgeous caramel colour, and the meat is juicy and delicious. I love to make this dish on a Sunday and use the leftovers in lots of different dishes throughout the week. Enjoy!
~XoK
Lazy Roast Chicken
Serves 4-6
Ingredients
1 fresh whole chicken, approximately 4 pounds, free range or organic if possible
2 tablespoons olive oil
Sea salt and freshly ground pepper
Directions
1. Remove the chicken from the fridge 30 minutes before you want to cook it, to allow it to come up to room temperature.
2. Preheat the oven to 220ºC/450ºF and adjust the oven rack to the middle of the oven. Place a 12-inch oven safe frying pan on the rack and close the oven door.
3. Unwrap the chicken, remove the neck or giblets inside the cavity, if they are there, and pat dry the chicken with kitchen roll.**
4. Drizzle the chicken with olive oil and season well with sea salt and black pepper, then rub it in well over the entire bird with your hands.
5. Carefully, set the chicken in the preheated oven safe frying pan in the oven, breast-side up. Roast 30 minutes and then check that the thickest part of the chicken breast registers 48ºC/120ºF on an instant-read thermometer.
6. Once it does, turn off the oven and leave the chicken in the oven until the breasts register 74ºC/165ºF {about 30 minutes}. If you don’t have a thermometer, a visual clue is that all the juices that come from the chicken should run clear and not be pink.
7. Transfer the chicken to a carving board, cover with aluminium, and allow to rest for 20 minutes. Carve and serve with the juices from the pan.
Additional Notes, Related Articles & Credit:
* {all synonyms for “lazy”!}.
** Here’s a quick Q & A in Poultry Care:
Q. Do I need to rinse my bird when I get it home?
A. The advice not to wash a chickens is longstanding as food safety experts widely agree it raises the risk of spreading dangerous bacteria found on raw poultry all over the kitchen.
Q. Is raw poultry as dangerous as people say?
A. It’s always better to be safe than sorry…so, after working with raw chicken, turkey or other birds, always clean your cutting board, knife, sink, counter, hands or whatever has come in contact with the poultry well with hot soapy water. Then dry it well and, for safe measure, wipe down with a disinfecting wipe.
Q. What are those little white feather bits stuck in the skin and should I remove them?
A. The little “white feather bits” are called “pin feathers” and yes you should remove them. I’ve heard of people using a blow torch to fry the little suckers…but a good pair of kitchen tweezers should do the trick.
*** Supposedly, the purpose of trussing a bird is to keep the splayed legs from burning. But, in all my years of roasting a chicken or a turkey, I have never seen an untrussed chicken or turkey burn or cook unevenly.
**** If your oven has a convection setting, use it. Your oven will be more evenly heated throughout. The drawback is that you’ll need to reduce the temperature stated for the recipe a wee bit. This can take a bit of experimentation, as all ovens are different. If a recipe calls for 220ºC/425ºF, I will typically drop the temperature down to 200ºC/400ºF.
***** Here are two video links to see how the experts check if their chicken is fully cooked without using a digital thermometer: BBCgoodfood.com and Food52.com.
Love this simply and honest receipe . I rarely cook roast chicken as I absolutely hate the smell of chicken – even free range smells awful to me. I dont know what it is – whether it is what they are fed or the awful conditions they are kept in – what chicken do you think does not smell awful – is it only organic ?
Hi Catriona. Thanks so much for stopping by and leaving a comment and question.
A good fresh chicken should not have any smell that is off putting…though if you have a particularly strong/sensitive sense of smell you might be getting a whiff of something the rest of us do not normally get.
I wonder too…could your thoughts about how a chicken is treated when it’s alive somehow make you especially sensitive to the smell of the chicken when it’s in the shops? If so, maybe only buying free range, organic, chicken is for you?
In our Irish Home, we are really thoughtful about what we put into our body {most of the time}, what we use to clean our home and what we put into our garden. Whenever possible, we go with organic products with ingredients we can pronounce and know.
I hope you find this helpful. Please stop by again and leave a comment. 😊
Kim – I am not making this up. I woke up this morning and my very first thought was: I have to roast that chicken in the fridge or it will go bad but I don’t have the energy (read: I’m too lazy) to do it!
Now here I am, having just taken a gorgeous chicken from the oven with minimal energy expended.
Thank God for you!
Please keep reading my mind!
Xoxo
Hi Amy!! You are the BEST! I always ❤️ hearing from you. You made me laugh and you made my day…thank you so much!! I hope your chicken turned out as well as I would expect it to. I often wonder how my readers version of a recipe turn out. Thank you for taking time to visit this little blog. I’ll do my best to keep giving you and other readers our family-tested recipes that hopefully bring you close to Ireland but do so with ease! XoK 🤗